1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to sensors for measuring physical parameters. In particular, the present invention relates to a tire system for measuring physical parameters affecting a tire of an automobile.
2. Description of the Background Art
Automobile tires are usually subject to internal and external forces when in use. In order to evaluate the performance of a tire, it would be advantageous to be able to measure a variety of physical parameters (e.g., temperature, strain force, pressure, etc.) of the tire. Existing systems measure the physical parameters of the tire by embedding one or more sensors in the tire. These existing systems have difficulty measuring a variety of parameters with sufficient spatial resolution and accuracy for various reasons.
First, the sensors are only embedded on the ground-contacting surface of the tire. As a result, measurements for the parameters are restricted to the tread of the tire. These measurements do not provide information about other portions of the tire.
Second, the geometry of the sensors used in existing systems do not allow for accurate measurements of forces affecting the whole tire (i.e., the sensors only measure forces affecting one or two localized areas of the tire). For example, the sensors are large in size and occupy up a large volume of space inside the tire. As a result, it is impossible to embed a sufficient number of sensors in the tire to allow for accurate measurement of forces affecting the whole tire. Embedding a sufficient number of these sensors would degrade the performance of the tire and possibly result in a safety risk to passengers of the automobile.
Third, the sensors used in the existing systems require a large amount of power when a sufficient number of sensors are used. Existing systems do not have an adequate power supply to support powering the number of sensors that would be required to yield accurate measurements of parameters for the whole tire.
Fourth, because a very limited number of sensors are embedded in the tire, only a few parameters of the tire are measured. The measurements yielded from these systems have low spatial resolution and low accuracy due to the above-described deficiencies in the sensors.